The present invention relates to the field of user interface design and, more particularly, to a multi-modal conversion tool for form-type applications.
User interfaces have been an ever-evolving aspect of software development. From punch cards to command prompts to graphical user interfaces (GUIs), user interfaces have always strived to provide users with an easy-to-use means of interaction. While the easiest means of communication is speech, a multitude of problems have kept conversation user interfaces (CUIs) from frequent use.
However, advancements in the field of speech recognition have begun to diminish the barriers for CUIs. As the user interface paradigm slowly begins to embrace CUIs, time and resources will be required to retrain developers and rework software applications. Being able to reuse existing software code would provide immense benefit to organizations.
Further, users will need to become accustomed to interacting with CUIs instead of GUIs. Thus, it would be logical for software applications to transition from a GUI-based interface to one that supports both GUI and CUI interfaces—a multi-modal interface. With a multi-modal user interface for a software application, the user is able to try the CUI and resort to the GUI, if necessary.